


Phantasm

by Broken_Clover



Category: Guilty Gear
Genre: Childhood Trauma, Dark, Gen, Identity Issues, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Night Terrors, Short, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-25
Updated: 2020-05-24
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:40:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24363694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Broken_Clover/pseuds/Broken_Clover
Summary: Flashbacks, night terrors, breakdowns. All the same, another way to ruin a good time.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 10





	1. Void

**Author's Note:**

> Why are all the children in this series put through so much fucked up stuff

Ramlethal’s nightmares only appear in the daytime.

It almost felt like a honeymoon at first, a sudden wave of euphoria crashing over all of them as they realized the girls’ newfound freedom. The Universal Will was well and truly gone, and the only thing that was able to dictate what the Valentines could be was their own selves. The Kiskes welcomed them as family and loved them the same. It was picturesque. It was perfect.

_“Ram? Is something wrong? Ram?”_

So maybe it only seemed natural that it didn’t last forever.

_“Mom! Dad! Something’s wrong with Ram!”_

At first, they had wondered if it was some lingering effect of the Universal Will still clinging onto Ramlethal. It hadn’t been too off the mark. But in the end, it had been something much more mundane, but no less sinister.

The whole family was consumed with concern, Sin most of all. They had no idea what had happened to her all of a sudden, and there was nothing to explain it. The castle doctors looked her over carefully, asking questions and performing tests. Hours later, they seemed content to release her, presuming it was just some odd incident. They advised the Kiskes to keep an eye on her, to take a little more caution, and to only really worry if it happened a second time.

And it did. It happened again, and again, and again. Just the same, every single time.

There’s always a certain way about her- Ram’s eyes go glassy, and her movements become stiff. It’s difficult to say if it’s possible for her to become even less talkative than normal, but even her quiet isn’t normal. All the tranquil warmth cools over until it’s a void where a person should be, but instead it’s just empty. 

Ram doesn’t explode or break down. She simply shuts off.

She never feels comfortable talking about it when it happens, or even mentioning it, unless she’s with her friends. Even then, it still struggles to come out. Ram speaks like someone’s trying to strangle her back into silence.

_“It’s like...I’m back to how things used to be.”_ She says. _“Back with mother. And I’m nothing. I’m hollow. That’s what I’m supposed to be. I’m supposed to do whatever she tells me, exactly when she wants me to. A-and then she smiles-_ ”

It was all she could manage, but it still painted a very clear picture. Ram had run away from Ariels, but the memories were still lodged deep in her mind, knocked free every so often to consume her with horrifying memories.

Her head is filled with the screams of Babylon. People she hadn’t thought twice about killing in the blink of an eye. It wasn’t that she’d hated them. It was so much worse than that. She simply hadn’t cared. 

_“It was thousands of people. **Thousands**. Just because I couldn’t make myself care. What kind of a monster does that make me?”_

They do her best to reassure her. She’s changed, and for the better. Ramlethal Valentine is a completely different person from the one they’d met at the Cradle. She learns and cares and asks and loves, a far cry from any sort of worthless weapon she believes herself to be. 

But it’s never quite enough, and she never quite believes them.


	2. Porcelain

Elphelt’s are drawn-out and painful to weather.

It wasn’t long after Ram’s first episode that Elphelt revealed a few marrs of her own. She was excellent at hiding it from view, in the same way she was able to hide her directives under a guise of gentle sweetness. But they don’t mention the resemblance, though everyone can see it. It’s like picking at an old scab, but if the scab tore away into a torrent of blood and had barely been holding anything together in the first place.

Elphelt smiles. She smiles and smiles and smiles, bit by bit adding chips and cracks to her porcelain mask until it can’t take the strain and shatters into a million pieces. By that point, the words ‘I’m fine’ have become a broken record and lost all meaning, aside from acting as the rapidly-peeling tape keeping all the pieces together.

At her core, she seems so desperate not to be an inconvenience to anyone. If everyone around her is happy, then Elphelt is supposed to be happy. It was easy to see it as politeness and accommodation at first, until a playful remark and swing of the arm from Sin sent her reeling backwards and cowering into a little ball, pleading for him not to hurt her.

_“El? El, I wasn’t gonna-”_

_“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, please don’t hit me, please don’t hurt me-”_

Those are the only times when she abandons the mask of normalcy. Stress can force her to crack over days, but a single raised hand reduces her to a shivering, sobbing mess.

Nobody knows the sorts of things that the Universal Will had done to her, not even Ram. Elphelt was a failsafe, requiring extensive programming and conditioning far beyond what was done to her twin. Ram could understand their mother’s callous ways, but she could only scratch the surface of what Elphelt must have been subject to.

The questions of her past nag them so, but they don’t want to force her to relive those memories. Nobody would be able to live with themselves if that terrified little voice came out again by something they chose to do. 

She hides her fear with pastels and lace and a bright cheery veneer. She neatly picks up the pieces after the incident and glues them back into her pretty little facade, refusing to acknowledge how it always inevitably breaks another time. 

They want to help her. They really, genuinely do. But there’s no way to talk about it directly without triggering another breakdown. How can they help her when they can’t even acknowledge it?

Maybe she would be better off being a doll after all.


	3. Morphine

In a way, it’s sort of funny, how Bedman is the only one of them who has his nightmares surface in the darkness, where he used to have the ultimate form of control.

It’s _so_ funny. Because everything is so funny, isn’t it? Just like the rest of his worthless, good-for-nothing existence. Just one massive joke. Like his dead sister and the pins in his chest. Hilarious.

He’s not the sort of person who’s open with his emotions, but it isn’t exactly something everyone can ignore. They couldn’t ignore the screaming if they wanted to.

The first few times, he’d managed to recover quickly enough to insist that no, he hadn’t heard anyone screaming, maybe it had just been a dream? But the dream had been short-lived, and they found him curled up tight in bed, eyes open but still shrieking like someone was trying to saw his arm off.

_“Beddy? Hey, c’mon, can you talk to me? Can you tell me what’s wrong?”_

Whenever Bedman manages to speak, it’s hardly coherent, and impossible to carry a conversation. He merely repeats himself again and again, sometimes mechanically monotonous, and other times nearly-hysteric in between bouts of screams.

_“It hurts...it hurts...it hurts…”_

_“No more needles! No more needles! Stop it! No more!”_

There’s not much they can do. He’s so out of it that any attempts at reassurance only rile him up more. The best option is the most painful one, trying to ignore the sound of screaming and let it run its course. It can be a handful of minutes or a few hours, depending on how much the universe feels like tormenting them that day.

_“Hey. Feeling a little better now?”_

_“Please don’t cut me open. Please don’t cut me open. Please don’t-”_

He always looks so confused when it’s over, like he really was somewhere else the whole time. There’s an odd innocence to his expression, but it only lasts for a moment before he remembers, and it all comes crashing back down.

He describes vivid nightmares, full of mutilation and torture. Crisscrossing piano wire acting as puppet strings, cutting through him as he dangles like a lifeless toy. Being electrocuted again and again until his skin burns and begins to peel off. The droning buzz and burning stench mixed with ozone and horrifying grinding sounds of a drill being driven through his skull as he sits motionless, unable to do anything in response but scream.

Whatever basis they have in reality, it’s gruesome enough to not want to think about. And it seems as though he’s happier not talking about it. It’s simple, really. If nobody acknowledges it, then he can pretend it isn’t real.


	4. Supernova

Sin’s are the rarest of all of them. It’s common for him to become childishly frustrated with his circumstances, but rage is something else entirely. When he finally hits his breaking point, he explodes like a star- burning hot and lashing out in every direction.

As much as he feels like a normal child most of the time, those rare instances served as an uncomfortable reminder that he was, by design, a living weapon, only held back by his innocence and sense of moral right. It’s mercifully restrained near-constantly, but every so often, they catch just a glimpse of what Sin could be if he wasn’t so laid-back.

There was a time when he was different, when his fury bubbled over at almost every provocation. None of them knew him like that, of course. They’ve only ever heard the stories. Sol never bothers with anything more than cursory information, and Ky always tries to lighten things as much as he can, but Sin fills in on the details, whenever doing so doesn’t make him look like he’s about to puke. 

_“I was just this angry thing, always throwing a fit whenever anything happened that I didn’t like. I guess it’s easy to think about how irrational it was after it already happened, but everything just ticked me off, and I could barely hold onto it.”_

But it wasn’t fully out of his control, and even at the time he knew it. Even when he burst into another yelling match with Ky, there was always some psychological thing holding him back from completely going off the deep end and trying to do something he knew he’d regret.

At least, there _had_ been. Until something foreign and alien had fished around in his mind, uncovering all his anger and frustration and enabling it, amplifying everything before setting it loose to wreak havoc. Prying open all his secrets and feelings in a way that made the sense of deep, visceral violation turn into burning rage directed at everything he looked at, family or not. If anything, the sight of someone he’d fostered a not-so-stifled anger against made it worse, with him being given the opportunity to finally explode in a blaze of burning-hot _hate,_ so thick and venomous and strangely inviting.

_“And the worst part is...I liked it. I liked what she did to me.”_

It’s one of the times they see Sin genuinely burst into tears. He never talks about it with his parents. Even without saying it, it’s obvious. He feels too ashamed to dare bring it up. Maybe if he ignores it, they can all move on. It feels like everyone else has moved on, or they just don’t care- but just the thought of it still made his stomach churn and panic flood his nerves. It nauseated him to think that he was capable of such hatred towards anything.

For a while, it just seemed like something stewing away in his brain. Of course Sin had his outbursts, but once they were done, he did his best to apologize. But the more they look, the more they find that isn’t true. Not every bit of frustration turns into a supernova. In fact, more often than not, he’ll sharply change directions whenever he starts getting worked up. At any sign of frustration, he runs away from it, like letting anything slip out would lead to something uncontrollable. As near-impossible as it would be to happen again, he’s afraid of losing himself and falling back into a rampage. Like some kind of monster. Like a wild animal.

Like a Gear. He’s afraid of being a Gear. Of what he was designed to be. At his core, that’s who Sin is. Someone who runs away from the things he’s afraid of. All the power in the world can’t make him not be afraid of himself.


End file.
